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Phillips & King’s Blue Mine, Springbok: What the £50 Purchase Secured
Additional Mines Stories | AMS 3
In 1850, Phillips & King paid £50 for 10 morgen and 351 square roods of copper-bearing ground at Springbokfontein.
The agreement reached much further than the outcrop. It secured mineral rights across the farm, access to water, grazing for working animals, roads and space for works. Those rights helped make a mine possible.
The Nama knew the district’s copper before colonial expeditions reached the Koperberg. What arrived in the 1850s was capital, and capital arrived with terms.
Phillips & King were Cape merchants. Their enterprise connected the Phillips and King families, local agents and overseas markets. John King had already participated in the unsuccessful South African Mining Company of 1846. The later undertaking drew on commercial experience as well as knowledge of the ore.
Its foundation was Melkboschkuil, the farm around Springbokfontein held by the seven Cloete brothers. The £50 purchase secured the initial parcel and its accompanying rights. Between 1851 and 1853, Phillips & King assembled the remaining interests in the farm for recorded consideration totalling £2,344 10s.
The mine did not arrive on empty ground. The initial deed transferred a limited parcel, while its accompanying rights gave the purchasers access to minerals, water and working space across a much larger property.
Commercial mining at the Blue Mine began in 1852. Copper ore left through Hondeklip Bay that year. Before Kimberley’s diamonds and the Witwatersrand’s gold, the Springbok district was moving into sustained industrial production.
The copper was rich. The logistics were brutal.
Moving bulk ore by ox-wagon across dry country was expensive enough to make even promising deposits difficult to work. A merchant’s ability to organise supplies, transport and sales mattered alongside the miner’s ability to raise ore.
Prospecting pushed outward from Springbok towards Okiep, Concordia and Nababeep. Phillips & King secured interests at Spektakel, Nababeep and Okiep; the Namaqua Mining Company developed a competing undertaking around Concordia. The district acquired more workings, employers and settlements.
The early years were volatile. Promoters floated more than twenty companies during the 1854–55 boom. Then geology and distance answered back. Bad roads, scarce water and difficult shipping helped break the speculative rush. The surviving undertakings required sustained finance and practical mining capability.
Phillips & King built Springbokfontein as a private company settlement, with houses, stores and workshops serving the mine. The company controlled residence there. In 1862, the settlement became a public village: Patrick Fletcher surveyed it and residential plots were auctioned.
Springbok became the administrative and logistical heart of the district; Okiep developed into its principal mining centre. Shops, services and transport businesses grew around the mines’ requirements.
In 1862–1863, Phillips & King’s mining properties passed into the Cape of Good Hope Copper Mining Company, promoted in London by John Taylor & Sons. John King joined its board, and King & Sons continued to manage its Cape affairs. British finance and technical management strengthened the undertaking while some of the earlier mercantile interests remained.
The Blue Mine’s richest ore was substantially exhausted by 1861, but it had begun a much larger industrial history. Springbok subsequently developed a broader role as a regional service centre, while the surrounding mining settlements experienced successive periods of production, closure and renewed investment.
The original £50 purchase secured a piece of copper-bearing ground. The accompanying rights helped determine who would control the water, roads and working space of the industry that grew around it.